Of the large cast of actors playing real-life civil rights activists in “Selma,” Lorraine Toussaint had the distinct advantage of playing one who is, amazingly, still alive.

The Juilliard graduate, best known for her role this year as the sinister inmate Vee on “Orange Is the New Black,” is cast as Amelia Boynton Robinson, an activist from Selma, Ala., whose role in 1965’s Bloody Sunday march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge was immortalized in a shocking photo of her beaten unconscious that made the cover of Life magazine.

“We re-enacted the entire photograph,” Toussaint tells The Post from the set of her current series, ABC’s “Forever,” where she plays Joanna Reece, a tough police lieutenant. “When that went out, that’s pretty much when President Johnson said, ‘We can’t support this anymore.’ It was the moment the world got to see what was happening in Alabama.”

Boynton was awarded the Martin Luther King Jr. Medal of Freedom in 1990. “She was one of the more outspoken civil rights speakers. The women for the most part took a back seat in terms of [civil rights] p.r., but in reality it was different,” Toussaint says. “She invited Martin Luther King to come to Selma and set up Selma as the battleground it turned out to be for the Voting Rights Act. She was pivotal in setting that up.”

Toussaint, who grew up in Crown Heights, met with Boynton Robinson during the film’s production. “I met Miss Amelia and she said to me, ‘The only thing wrong with me now is that I’m starting to go a little bit deaf. So I’m going to need you to speak up. Just a little bit.’ I said, ‘Miss Amelia, if that’s all that I’ve got to do . . . from your mouth to God’s ear, I should be so lucky.’

“She was extraordinary. She was all there. You could look at this woman and say, ‘Oh, good Lord, she just needs a new model. This body that she’s in, she just needs a newer model because everything was [Toussaint snaps her fingers].’ We talked about cooking and kids. We actually didn’t talk that much about the movement. We just talked about her life and my daughter and what I was up to. It was the most wonderful meeting. I’m so honored to play her.”